feneur

Animations are really an area where a lot of work is needed, and due to both a lack of animation skills and previous (and to a lesser degree current) issues with the Blender Collada export/import it's been a bit sporadic. With the latest couple of versions of Blender the Collada support has been improved, so more animations have been added, and will be added. Hopefully mechanical things like the catapults should be done relatively soon. Organic things like animals which takes a bit more practice before one is able to animate properly might take a while longer before we have them all done.

That seems like a completely different issue, but thanks for trying to help

While I doubt we set up some specific high-level scripting it should definitely be possible. Just have the player share the same "player" (i.e. control the same units/buildings) as an AI that only has economic capabilities. The only issue that I can think of (though as I'm not a programmer there might be more that I just don't think of ) is what to do with the Citizen Soldiers. The easiest way would just be to not use them in the attack =) Perhaps have the AI defend the city as well as gathering resources. Either way I definitely think something like this should be doable without much trouble. Some kind of AI co-op mode is likely to be included anyway, so it's probably more an issue of implementing an AI that does things just the way you want it (And there would need to be some work done to allow what you mention in point II, but apart from the GUI part it should mostly be AI work that as well )

Well, we could, but then you'd have to wait for all the other awesomeness =) This release has been long in the making as it is, so unless something unexpected happens it will be out reasonably soon. Better to take the time to implement these pathfinding improvements without the stress of trying to get a new release out soon.

If someone else is willing to do the work perhaps, but I doubt it. You'd probably have to redesign the entire game to work with such controls, so it's at least not something we intend to work on.

All kinds, well not wood-working or metallurgy necessarily, but definitely a broad assortment of skills overall. To create the actual game itself we need people with programming skills, and people who are good at creating 3D models, at texturing those models, and at creating 2D art for the menus and background etc. We also need people who are skilled at creating the appropriate sounds and recording them, and at composing and recording and in some parts playing the music for the game, and at speaking the relevant languages for the unit voices. As the game is historically based we also need people who know enough of the history of the time to make it reasonably historically correct. Then there is need for skills which aren't directly related to the game as a product, but rather as a project, that includes management, PR, and perhaps most importantly a great deal of communication to make sure things go smoothly. You'll have to ask someone who's actually completed one to get a good answer to that one Donations I'd say personally at least. We haven't spent much effort on advertisements though, apart from the full time work Pledgie we don't really have that big needs for money currently. Just maintaining a web server + a domain name or two doesn't cost very much. If/when we implement some kind of lobby server that might change though, depending on how many people who will play the game at the same time. The main issue with advertising as I see it is that it's often controlled by someone else, and we might end up with ads for something that goes against everything we stand for etc. If the need arises for more money at a later time it's probably more likely that we will try to find a sponsor for e.g. a multiplayer lobby server or similar. To some extent we rely on word-of-mouth, but we do have accounts and post on IndieDB/ModDB, Facebook, Twitter, Youtube, and we try to get relevant bloggers and other sites aware of 0 A.D. We try =) The long answer is that partly we are finding our way and haven't really gotten all the way to a perfect release cycle yet =) Perfect is of not necessarily attainable, but things would certainly benefit from a slightly more well defined release cycle in some cases. Partly, and this is related to the learning as we go part, we are after all doing this on our free time, and haven't really done anything like it before. So while we can have ideas about what we want to accomplish for a certain release it's impossible to know for sure whether it's going to be possible to achieve all of it. Not only don't we know how long it will take to implement a certain feature, but the other factor making any kind of prediction hard is that we cannot know beforehand how much time a contributor will have during a release cycle. Overall things seems to work at least reasonably though, we've been releasing new Alphas relatively regularly. [i will have to ask Philip about that one, a caveat is always that it's hard to know for sure as people are getting the game from so many different places. And even the we cannot be sure they actually play the game. A rough guess from the web site stats is that we have Linux and Windows almost even (a bit above 40% each), but with Linux a bit higher, and Mac at slightly lower than 10%. The latter might change once it is easier to install the game on Mac and once we have the game working better on Macs.] Since we do this as a hobby it's all from home. And those homes are in many different places around the world, which of course adds to the fun in being part of this project, but also to the difficulties as it's hard to have real time communication when people live as far apart as in the US, in England, in Israel, in India, and in New Zealand.

I don't know the answer to the first question, but I do know the answer to the latter two: First the last question, the easiest way in most cases is just to click the building icon to be able to place it, then position your mouse in the in-game world and then instead of just clicking press the left mouse button while moving the mouse. As soon as you let go the button the building foundation will be placed. Unless you are in a spot where it can't be built, which can be used as a trick if you e.g. want to line up wall pieces (a proper wall system will come later): just rotate it in the right way while over an obstacle, then let go of the left mouse button and move to where you actually want to place the building. There it's just to left click and the foundation will be placed. It is also possible to change the hotkeys, later we hope to include an in-game options screen, but for now it's possible editing some text files. Please see: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/wiki/Manual_Settings and if that's not clear enough feel free to ask for more help here

Hmm, while we certainly could answer those questions, perhaps it would be better to ask a real company? After all your class is on economics as far as I can see, so our experience might not be all that relevant as we don't have that concern to a great degree. Sure, there are costs involved with having a server etc and currently we have Philip doing some paid work on the game, but that's really an exception. I mean your questions are definitely relevant as to WFG, so I'm more curious whether or not your teacher would approve of this kind of approach to the task. I'm only asking since i don't want you (and to a lesser degree the person answering) to have to spend time on something that then will have to be redone.

A random texture sounds like it would look bad, the main reason not every building has its own texture is because that would make the game run slower. Having more than one texture for each building sounds even worse in terms of performance. There currently isn't a wall system, so yeah, that is something we intend to do something about

I'd say, don't read too much into it =) But if nothing else you can always think of it as killing off some of them/their offspring each year, thus still leaving the same total number of animals but also getting food

Cool

Now he does

Not sure it would be all that much easier to search for a button. (Especially since the in-game area would have to be reduced in favor of the GUI if we add too many buttons ) After all, the first resource dropoff point should be close to where you are in the first place, and you'd need to move the mouse to the next resource anyway. The only good thing about a button imho would be that you would be able to memorize where it is and thus find it quicker because of that. You'd still need to move the mouse away though, so I doubt that makes it worth it.

I haven't actually tested, but it should be possible to just shift-right-click on the dropoff point and then on the next resource to queue it automatically. (Iirc there are still some issues with the group code and queuing, at least for some orders, so perhaps it only works for single units.)

Some minor things: The game is developed in C++, not C. For the operating systems, do we really still support Windows 2000? I thought we added something/some dependency a year or two ago that made at least Windows XP required. I could be wrong on that one though, so don't change anything just on my suspicion. How to start 0 A.D. As long as you have installed an Alpha (and unless it doesn't differ between OS versions) the way to start 0 A.D. would be: Start-->All programs (or something similar, don't have an English version of Windows installed, so the wording might be different)-->0 A.D. alpha-->0 A.D. Feedback section: It would be helpful if you mentioned that if people want to give more in-depth feedback, or get help solving any possible issues, it would be better to go to the forums. The feedback messages aren't checked as often, and most importantly there's no way for us to get back to the users in question to offer more help or ask for clarifications etc. 2.3.1 Single Player. Under "Map Filter" you say the engine is called Pyrogenisis, the correct spelling is Pyrogenesis Also in that section you can feel free to mention the additional options you can set for random map games. 4.0 Units. There is a started sentence: "You can read more about the", which seems to need some continuation 4.1.2 Citizen soldiers. "It is important to notice that advanced building can only be built by citizen soldiers." advanced building-->advanced buildings A very minor thing, but it's nice to be consistent: it's up to you whether you want to capitalize Citizen Soldiers etc, but I'd say do it the same way all the time. One way would be to capitalize it the first time it's included and then not (apart from the first word when it's at the start of a sentence of course 8-) ). 4.1.5 Navy. Probably easier to explain by just saying it's the ships "Wood can only be gathered from trees, if you cant see many trees around you. Send a scout or other fast unit to go looking for some in the shroud of darkness (also known as the Fog-of-War)." Two things, first a very small thing: I would write the part from "from trees" to "Send a scout" to: "from trees. If you can't see many trees around you send a scout" etc. Second, the Shroud of Darkness and Fog of War are two different things. The Shroud of Darkness is the dark area that covers areas that you haven't explored yet, the Fog of War is the grey fog covering the areas of the map which are already explored, but which is not in line of sight of any of your units/buildings. When we're talking about resources, don't forget to add some info about bartering which will be included in Alpha 8 I know you haven't yet updated it for Alpha 8, but I'm just mentioning it here so you don't forget it 6.1 Training units. It might be a good idea to mention that you can train units in batches of five/any number divisible by five by pressing the Shift key one or more times when starting the training. It costs the same as training them one by one, but it is faster to train five at a time than one by one five times. It of course still takes longer to train five units than one of course though, so it's not necessarily the best in the beginning of the game. 6.2 Constructing buildings "Female soldiers"--> Female Citizens (they are after all working units rather than fighting units ) 7.1 Rushing. "At the start of a game, during first few minutes"--> "At the start of a game, during the first few minutes". 7.2 Booming. "Actions: At the beginning, focus on a better economy, and make enough female citizens to have a total of 15 female-citizens in the beginning". First a very minor thing, for consistency I suggest removing the hyphen between female and citizens. Second, it's generally not a good idea to just create a lot of female citizens in the beginning as they are not as good at gathering other things than food from berries and farms. (I think they are slower at building as well.) Their low cost of course still make them important in the beginning, I just think it's important not to only create female citizens (especially since that makes you more vulnerable ). Turtling and Ambush, the final section of each: "But don't be tempted to send troops from your backup base to the base your losing." "base your losing"-->"base you're losing" Overall some really nice work, hope you'll keep it up

Sorry I would prefer to have them reviewed first, it was so long ago that these lists were compiled, but I'm not sure we have someone on the team with enough knowledge of ancient Greek to do that. Perhaps ask the forumers to help? There seems to be a couple with at least some knowledge of ancient Greek.

Not sure whether this is something qbot should do as much as UnitAI should do. At least the general part, imho ranged units should always try and get farther away from melee units than just to the minimum range limit. As it is now they move just enough to be able to shoot if the attacker stays in the same spot, but that doesn't work since the attacker is getting closer. I'd say ranged units should always try and get to say 75% of the distance between minimum range and maximum range when being attacked by a melee unit. The "order a group attack" part is something I agree the AIs should do though

As per Philip's suggestion it's probably a good idea to try and figure out a bit more what exactly it is we want with the formations before we've spent several months just listing our ideas on formations and what they might be like. I'm getting sleepy so I'm just going to copy Philip's questions and try and give my opinion on them, please feel free to fill in the blanks and add any additional aspects. The main thing is the one that's been frequently mentioned before: the moshpit fighting. So, regardless of exactly how we end up doing formations I believe this is one of the main things we shold avoid. I don't remember the formations giving much of a benefit/incentive to use anything other than the basic one, so that's another issue we should keep in mind. Imho formations definitely should add an extra layer of tactics to combat. In the Age games it's generally more about producing troops and getting them to the battle field, and doing it more quickly than your enemy, than actually using your units in a good and effective way. I would like both More fun micromanagement and less boring. Seriously though, this is partly why I suggested doing something like having the battalion/formation divided into sections/sides. Now I never learned too much about the micromanagement in the Age games as I mostly played against the default AIs, but to me it's a bit tedious gaining a slight benefit from things like having all/many archers aiming at the same enemy unit. To some extent my answer is similar to the second question: I think having formations that actually block enemy movement effectively is one of the things that would help making them useful/fun. That way they would actually be useful compared to just units standing there in some random order. On the other hand I think they should not block too much, because that would rule out flanking/attacking from the rear etc which would help make eg the horse units useful in a way they aren't now. In fact, one of the major reasons why I think we should have useful formations in general, regardless of exactly how we implement them/what they do, is to give some benefit/use to melee units. Currently ranged units are way more useful. I guess the alternative would be to make ranged units less useful (i.e. less accurate, doing less damage etc), but having units being less useful sounds like less fun. At least above a certain level of balancing. In general I think large formations doesn't add much more than coolness/looks, but they do offer a value in the sense that they would for example block off larger areas. But that probably just means relatively large and not insanely large =)

The original plan was to release it earlier than that, but it was decided that we should try and solve some of the biggest performance issues before making the release. So we are currently unable to say when we will be able to release Alpha 8. Hopefully at least in time for Christmas, but we cannot say for sure yet.

It was added =) I think Ben did it last time. If you know the Unicode code for that specific letter the easiest way to make sure it's done is to create a ticket called something like "Add Unicode character ###" to Trac (This was the last time I believe: http://trac.wildfiregames.com/ticket/960 So it seems it was Philip who fixed it, but Ben who reported it.)

Yeah, and I remember when playing AoK that even if I had deforested the entire map etc, I rarely used even close to all those resources (as you may guess I enjoy playing defensively And basically wait until the AI was already defeated before attacking =) ). It might be fun for some people/in some cases if there is a gameplay mode with renewable resources, so I'm not against it completely, but I don't think it should be the default.

Just thought of another thing, it would be great if qbot would be able to barter, that way it could survive even if an enemy at that point is surrounding it and it has used used up all nearby wood, but there is plenty of stone and metal (and more long-term food, but if it hasn't resolved this particular issue by that time it probably has no chance). Not sure how much it would take to get it to do that though, and in general I'd say it's better to focus on expansion so it never finds itself in that situation. Just something to keep in mind. Once trade is in qbot should definitely use that though, I'd say that should be higher priority. Both because that actually produces resources (compared to barter which just converts them to get you out of a tricky situation etc) and because it would be great for interacting with other players in a non-combat way (and even if you're not allied with qbot trade routes would be either a nice target or at the very least they'd make the map more alive ).

Some of those should be fixed already, and we're hoping to have most fixed for Alpha 8 (a big reason why it might still be a while before it's out, we want to try our best to improve the performance, especially in cases like this).

Well, as you say our content is licensed under CC-BY-SA, so we can't, and won't restrict you from putting it up on your site. I'm having trouble seeing what we would gain from putting in any effort in getting the content onto the site ourselves though. Most of our content is created with the specific purpose of being in the game, and while other people could find some use/inspiration in our content I think it is to a lesser degree that we could benefit from other people's content. To some extent one of the reasons we're creating this game is for the sheer joy of creating, so using pre-existing models doesn't sound anywhere near as rewarding. Either way it is probably going to take some work to get the models to work properly for your site. We do not use the texture information in the Collada files themselves, but rather use XML files to tie models and textures together. Now, I'm not one of the artists, so I don't know all the aspects of what that means, but if nothing else the person uploading the files would have to make sure both the model and the texture is available in the same folder + update the path (and possibly other information) in the Collada file to link to the texture.

(But preferably with some more space between them =) Right now they squish together/overlap a bit too much But yeah, I think they should be completely outside any formations in that sense. Perhaps if you select them together they'd move along behind the formation, either spread out behind it or in a line behind it depending on what space there is.)